Get in before the start!
MANY readers will no doubt share my profound dismay at the decision made in late May by the Planning Inspectorate to allow an appeal by a developer which will lead to the demolition of the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway’s Bridge 234 in the Lincolnshire town of Bourne (see News, page 24).
This classic 1980-built overbridge is (and maybe was, by the time this edition hits the streets) the sole significant publicly-accessible railway-built structure left in Bourne from its days as a four-way junction.
At a time when we are making big plans to mark the bicentenary of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, which worked a global transport revolution as the world’s first steam-operated public railway, the last vestiges of a system that shaped modern-day Bourne are being finally erased.
But ‘not quite’, says the developer of a new 373-home estate in the town’s Elsea Park. It will use the bricks to create a piazza in a ‘pocket park’ and children’s play area to mark where the bridge –once a definitive gateway to the town – once stood, and there will be a sign to inform passers-by of that fact.
How on earth can that truly be described as conservation, an increasing number of townsfolk have asked? Surely the core essence of any historical monument is its shape, design, and position, and not the bricks it is made of?
As we reported in issue 285 of Heritage Railway, at a South Kesteven District Council planning meeting in September, eight out of nine elected members from throughout the political spectrum voted to refuse permission for the pocket park on the grounds that the developer’s plans for it did not go far enough to protect its heritage.
In other words, the plans would involve knocking the bridge down.
To me, those eight councillors are not only
heroes of heritage, but also of local democracy.
The Government inspector criticised them for going against the advice of the local authority’s planning officer, as the council had months before agreed in principle to the bridge’s removal. Since then, thanks to campaigning by the excellent Bourne History Group, far more local residents became aware of the bridge, which for decades had been entwined in the rampant growth of an unofficial wildlife haven. Once they ‘rediscovered’ it, 2000 people signed a petition to save it, and many offered their services for free to maintain it should the chance arise.
At that meeting, those eight councillors were representing the wishes of the enlightened electorate, as further and better particulars had emerged since the council’s original indication. In short, they were Doing Their Job. Sadly, the inspector has also seen fit to award the costs of the appeal against the council because of their voting.
There is an underlying major lesson here, not only for the whole railway heritage sector but also for any individual or group who considered that a particular structure, artefact, or landscape feature of any type should be saved for future generations. If you see it, get your story in there first. Before the site in question is sold, or a developer prepares any application for outline planning permission, research the object to the full, and then let everyone know that it needs to be preserved. Email district, town and parish councillors and your MP, send your representation by recorded delivery to the responsible council, and maybe inform the local press if a threat to the feature arises.
If you sit back and let a planning application take its course, you run the risk of being too late. As we in this sector know all too well, once heritage is lost, we are all the poorer for it.